Into the Gauntlet Read online

  This was almost over.

  103

  But Miss Pluderbottom's eyes suddenly went soft.

  "Why, Jonah," she said. "Oh, my." She clutched her heart. "Every other fifteen-year-old boy I've ever met would moan and groan and act like that assignment was torture. But you--you really do like Shakespeare. I can tell."

  Jonah bolted straight up in his chair.

  "I do not!" he said. "That's a lie!"

  Miss Pluderbottom was studying him again.

  "No, you're lying now," she said. "You are a huge Shakespeare fan."

  Jonah dropped to his knees on the floor in front of Miss Pluderbottom.

  "Please!" he said. "Don't tell anyone! I'll do anything! I'll send you to every Shakespeare performance at every recreated Globe Theatre in the world! You'd love the Tokyo one! And Dallas! And Rome! And--"

  "Jonah." Miss Pluderbottom actually laughed. "It's not a crime to love Shakespeare."

  "But it would ruin my rep!" Jonah said. "All my street cred --gone!"

  Sure, around other Janus he could admit that he loved Shakespeare. And Mozart, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Bach ... all the old dudes. Back in China he'd even slipped and said too much to Dan. But he figured he could deny that if he had to.

  He could never let his fans see this side of him.

  "It's okay," Miss Pluderbottom said. "Truly, Shakespeare has a lot in common with hip-hop artists."

  104

  Jonah stared at her.

  "That's ... that's what I always thought," he whispered.

  "That's why I always use 'Gotta Live the Gangsta Life' to introduce my Shakespeare sonnet unit. Really gets my students listening for the rhythm of the words," Miss Pluderbottom said.

  Jonah fell over backward onto the floor. When he could sit up again, he stammered, "You --you know my work?"

  "Get out!" Miss Pluderbottom said. "Can't a seventy-year-old spinster schoolteacher from Iowa like hip-hop? That new song you just posted online, 'How the Feuding Hurts' -- I think that might be your best work yet!"

  So Miss Pluderbottom was just another fan. Everything was going to work out.

  "Then you'll tell the police and the media you were wrong," Jonah said confidently. "Say you just mistook some other kid at the Globe for me. Tell them I wasn't even there!"

  "I can't do that. Didn't you hear anything I said about integrity and honesty?" Miss Pluderbottom said. "But--you're a fan!"

  "And that's another reason I'm not going to lie for you," she said. "Telling the truth is good for your character and mine. 'To thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man.' From--"

  105

  "Hamlet," Jonah said glumly.

  Jonah felt like Hamlet: doomed. Miss Pluderbottom would never recant. Jonah would be charged with vandalism. His career would be ruined. And the Clue hunt would only get worse and worse---until he really did have to kill someone.

  "Jonah, those aren't just empty words," Miss Pluderbottom said gently. "I think you need to be true to your own self."

  She was probably just talking about admitting to the world that he loved Shakespeare. But Jonah heard so much more in her voice.

  Is my true self the kid who set Dan up to be murdered--or the kid who rescued him? Jonah wondered. The kid who obeys his mom or the one who sees a better way?

  Who am I?

  106

  CHAPTER 10

  Dan peeked into a cradle. It held a doll, meant to represent the infant William Shakespeare.

  Maybe the next due is hidden on that doll somehow, Dan thought. Under its clothes? In its stuffing?

  Dan reached toward the doll --

  And felt his whole body jerked backward. Someone had grabbed him by his collar.

  "Young man!" It was the guide, a woman who had looked deceptively friendly when he, Amy, and Nellie had first walked into the room that was supposedly where Shakespeare had been born.

  Now she glared down at him.

  "No touching the artifacts!" she said sternly.

  "But you just said none of the furniture was original, so-"

  "It's still hundreds of years old!" the guide said.

  Would it be pushing his luck if Dan said, "Not the doll. The doll looks plastic"?

  Before Dan had a chance to decide, the guide shoved him toward the next room.

  107

  "Out!" she commanded.

  Amy and Nellie hung back, pretending they didn't know him. Maybe they'd find a lead without him.

  But when they rejoined him in the garden behind the Shakespeare Birthplace, Amy shook her head glumly.

  "That guide was a rising bollard!" Dan complained.

  "Is that another one of the Shakespeare insults?" Nellie asked.

  "No --it's just something I saw on a road sign a few blocks back," Dan admitted. '"Beware rising bollards' -- it must mean speed bumps or something like that. But it sounds like a great insult, doesn't it?"

  Amy shrugged off her backpack and let it drop to the ground. She'd been carrying around about a dozen Shakespeare books, "just in case." She seemed to be aiming the backpack at Dan's toes, but he dodged it.

  "Really, Dan," Amy said. "Did you think you could just grab whatever you wanted with the guide right there? Use your brain!"

  "I was using my brain," Dan insisted. "I thought that the guide wasn't looking. And that the doll would be the best place to hide a lead. And that we don't have much time. What if somebody else gets the next clue before us?"

  Amy put her hands on her hips.

  "Do you see any of the other teams lurking around?" Amy demanded.

  108

  "No, but-"

  Dan stopped because Amy was no longer listening. She was glancing around the deserted garden, a baffled look on her face. She walked over to the fence and peered up and down the street.

  "What are you looking for?" Dan asked.

  Amy came back, grimacing.

  "Cahills," she said. "Isn't it weird that none of the others are here?"

  It was surprising, Dan realized. The other teams had had eighteen hours to catch up with Amy and Dan and Nellie. The Shakespeare Birthplace was already closed when they arrived in Stratford last night --and the house had been locked up tight, with serious-looking bars on every window. So the three of them had had to check into a hotel and wait for morning.

  "I bet nobody else got as much of the poem back at the Globe as I did," Dan said proudly. "They couldn't figure it out."

  "Yeah, but coming to Stratford-upon-Avon is pretty obvious if you're looking for something about Shakespeare," Amy argued. "And all of them know about Shakespeare, or they wouldn't have been at the Globe. Maybe we missed something. Maybe the others are at one of the other Shakespeare houses."

  "Wait --how many Shakespeare birthplaces are there?" Dan asked. He tried not to sound panicked. "The dude was only born once. And that was here. Right?"

  109

  Amy laughed. "Right, as far as anyone knows. But there are four other Shakespeare houses around Stratford," she said. She pulled a book out of her backpack and began leafing through it. "The houses where his wife grew up, where his mother grew up, where his daughter and son-in-law lived, where his granddaughter lived..."

  "Jeez, why didn't they just save every house the man ever stepped in?" Dan muttered.

  "Oh, I wish they had!" Amy said wistfully.

  "Joking, Amy," Dan said. "Big-time joking."

  "Well, I think we should go to all the other Shakespeare houses, just to be sure," Amy said, looking through the book. "We could start with--"

  "Oh, no," Dan said, shaking his head. "Remember the poem?" He dug into his pocket and pulled out the scraps they'd brought back from the Globe. They'd carefully taped everything together last night at their hotel. "See this line?" He stabbed his finger at the paper. "'For this great man we sing was bo-orn here.' You said that word had to be 'born.' We wrote it in! So that's where we have to look. Just where Shakespeare was born. Just. Th
is. One. Old. House."

  "Where he was bo-orn," Nellie mocked.

  "Well, I had to say it that way," Dan said. "It's like the words forced me."

  Nellie started to laugh. Then she stopped and gaped at him.

  "Give me that," she said, snatching the paper from

  110

  Dan. She seemed to be reading it to herself. Her lips moved. Her head bounced up and down, just like it did when she was listening to her iPod. "Iambic pentameter," she muttered. "It's supposed to be iambic pentameter, isn't it?" She bent over and began digging through Amy's backpack. "Got any books analyzing Shakespeare's sonnets?" she asked.

  "No," Amy said apologetically. "I couldn't buy everything. I only had so much room in my backpack."

  Nellie sprang up. She looked toward the gift shop, shook her head, and then dashed back into the Shakespeare Birthplace.

  Amy and Dan exchanged glances and ran after her.

  By the time they caught up with her, she was on the second floor again, back in the Shakespeare birth-room--and talking to the guide who'd yelled at Dan.

  Dan tried to hide behind Amy.

  "Shakespeare's sonnets," Nellie was saying to the guide. "Iambic pentameter, right?"

  "Oh, yes," the woman said. "Almost always. Iambic pentameter, fourteen lines, rhyme scheme a-b-a-b --"

  "C-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g," Nellie finished, as if she was agreeing with the woman.

  Dan thought this was like the times when Nellie jabbered away in some foreign language --French, Spanish, even the Italian she'd picked up so quickly. Once again, Dan had no clue what she was talking about.

  111

  Oh! He suddenly realized. She's distracting the guide so I can search the doll!

  He wished she'd said she was planning to do that. He poked Amy. If he could just get her to step to the right, he could bend down over the cradle and the guide wouldn't see him. Amy glanced at him, and Dan motioned with his hands.

  Amy frowned and shook her head -- and stepped closer to the guide and Nellie.

  Okay, maybe that would work instead.

  "Pentameter?" Amy asked the guide. "That means five something per line?"

  "Feet," the guide said.

  Were they still talking about poetry? Since when did poetry have feet?

  "Maybe it's easier to think of it as five beats per line," the guide said. "It's easiest to hear if you say it out loud like, oh, let's try Sonnet Eighteen: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' See? Five syllables emphasized, each one coming after one unstressed syllable. Iambic pentameter."

  "I thought so!" Nellie exclaimed.

  She was really laying it on thick. She made it sound like this was exciting, like iambic whatchamacallit really mattered.

  The guide looked toward Dan. Quickly, he ducked behind Amy again.

  Nellie was fumbling with the taped-together paper.

  112

  "A, uh, friend of mine is trying to write a poem about Shakespeare in the same style as his sonnets," she said, holding out the page for the guide to see. She folded it over, so the only part that showed was the ending. "This last line doesn't really work, does it?"

  '"For this great man we sing was bo-orn here'?" the guide read aloud.

  Hey! Dan thought. The words forced her to say it that way, too.

  While the guide's head was bent over the paper, Dan dipped toward the cradle. Amy yanked him back up just as the guide lifted her head.

  Cover for me! Dan wanted to scream. But maybe it didn't matter. Maybe Dan should just dive at the cradle, grab the doll, and run away so fast no one could catch him.

  Dan waited for the guide to look at the paper again.

  "Are you sure this is a 'friend's' poetry?" the guide asked suspiciously. "Not your own?"

  "Oh, yeah," Nellie said. "I wouldn't write like that."

  Her hand shot out, and she grabbed Dan by the arm, holding him in place.

  Now Dan was completely confused. How was he supposed to snatch the doll and run away with Nellie holding on to him? What did she expect him to do?

  "This line's not that bad," the guide was saying.

  113

  "Not bad enough to be torn up. Can you think of a two-syllable word that means 'born'? That's what's throwing everything off." Dan froze.

  What the others were talking about--it was important. All this talk of syllables and beats meant that the word Amy had been so certain about was wrong. The doll Dan had been planning to steal didn't matter. They weren't supposed to look for their next lead at the place where Shakespeare had been born. They were supposed to look in a place where he'd been ... something else.

  The guide was still studying the paper.

  "Are you sure your friend doesn't want to write about Shakespeare's death instead of his birth?" she asked. "'Buried' would fit perfectly here."

  Buried, Dan thought. "For this great man we sing was buried here." Yes.

  Nellie grabbed the paper back from the guide.

  "You're right!" she said. "Thank you! Thank you!"

  With her hand still on Dan's arm, she began dragging him toward the door.

  "You're welcome but --where are you going?" the guide asked.

  "Burst of poetic inspiration. Gotta follow it," Nellie explained.

  "Where was Shakespeare buried?" Dan asked. He thought it was safe to let the guide notice him, now that he was leaving.

  114

  "Holy Trinity Church, over by the river," the guide said. "You just go--"

  But Dan missed the rest. He, Amy, and Nellie were already through the next room and racing down the stairs, leaping down three steps at a time.

  115

  CHAPTER 11

  Sinead Starling crouched out of sight in a pew at Holy Trinity Church. She and Alistair were the advance scouting team. Her brothers were on guard duty outside. At least, that's what she'd told Alistair the boys would do.

  He can't tell, can he? she wondered. He hasn't noticed that my brothers are...

  There were certain words that Sinead didn't let herself think. She hugged her arms around her torso. Even through her sweatshirt, she could feel the ridges of scar tissue that crisscrossed her rib cage --just one of her souvenirs from the explosion at the Franklin Institute. She shivered, the horrible memories crashing down on her yet again:

  The flash of light, the rumble of what seemed to be the whole world falling in on her and her brothers...the pain... the screaming. How many times did she shout her brothers' names before anyone answered? How many times did Sinead beg, "Save them! Please save them!"

  116

  Sinead gritted her teeth and tried to shut down the flow of memories.

  We just have to win, she reminded herself. No matter what. That's the only thing we can think about.

  She and her brother had already had two lucky breaks, getting mysterious tips about the Globe yesterday and the church today. Not that Sinead had exactly told Alistair she was getting help with her brilliant deductions.

  "Psst." Alistair's whisper came through the tiny communications device hidden in Sinead's headband. Sinead might not trust Alistair, but this was one point in his favor: He loved gadgets as much as Sinead and her brothers did. Or as much as they always had.

  "I'm in," Sinead whispered back. "Nothing to report yet."

  Not that she intended to report anything truly worthwhile to Alistair.

  "I think we can call your brothers off guard duty," Alistair whispered from his position on the other side of the church. "It appears we are latecomers to this party."

  "What? What's that mean?" Sinead hissed.

  She raised her head so fast she cracked it against the side of the pew.

  Oh, Sinead realized, the pain in her head growing. He means that the other clue-hunting teams are already here.

  A cluster of Holts was striding down the aisle near

  117

  the front of the church in what looked to be a military formation.

  Jonah Wizard was skulking along the wall, runn
ing his fingers over the stones.

  And two of those nasty Kabras, Natalie and Ian, were closing in on Alistair. Trapping him in the corner.

  We're Ekats, you're an Ekat.... It's really like we're on the same team, Sinead had said to Alistair only yesterday when she was trying to get him to tell his secrets. Had he believed her? Would he expect her to come to his assistance now?

  Sinead started to stand up --she really did. But the memory of the Franklin Institute explosion hovered at the edge of her mind. Sinead still didn't know which of the other Clue-hunting teams had caused it. What if it had been the Kabras?

  Ian was reaching into his pocket.

  For a gun? Sinead wondered. Or something worse--a hand grenade? A detonator?

  Sinead's flashback was starting again. If there was another explosion, could Sinead get out to her brothers in time to make sure they were safe?

  Ian pulled out... a piece of paper.

  "How many clues do you have, Uncle Alistair?" he asked in an ingratiating voice as he glanced down at the paper. "Just confidentially, you can tell me. Brag. Tell me how much smarter you Ekats are than we Lucians."

  He gave Alistair a smile that was probably meant to

  118

  be charming. Sinead thought it looked desperate.

  Desperation was something she understood.

  "Appealing to my vanity, are you?" Alistair asked. "Please. Give me credit for being smarter than that."

  "You have fourteen clues, don't you?" Natalie asked. "Fifteen, if you count the clue the Starlings stole from Bae Oh and shared with you. And six of them are clues that no one but Ekats have. Right?"

  Alistair blinked.

  Uncle Alistair! Sinead thought. Can't you fake them out any better than that? You just confirmed everything!